iVisatravel

A travel support service that helps people get their visas, passports, and other documents sorted quickly and stress-free

http://www.ivisatravel.com/

iVisa image

The Challenge

Approximately 35% of visa application orders remained incomplete each day by the agents, leading to frequent back-and-forth communication between users and visa processing agents. This not only created friction in the user experience but also significantly increased the agents’ workload.

90%

Of the open tickets are related to photo upload issues both by users and agents
60+%

Of the open tickets are assigned to multiple agentsin a day
30%

Of the open tickets are related to improper written text by the agents
35%

Of the visa application orders remains incomplete in a day

How might we streamline order information management and inter-agent communication to reduce errors and ensure shared understanding?

Process

Process UX

Research

We chose a qualitative approach, specifically job shadowing and one-on-one interviews, to gain first-hand insights and uncover actionable solutions.I began by recruiting participants for both methods. We conducted in-depth interviews with 10 visa processing agents across our offices in Peru and India, alongside two job shadowing sessions. During these sessions, we closely observed how agents filled out application forms, coordinated with their teams, and interacted with users daily. These observations provided a rich pool of data that required careful analysis.


“There is a lot of miscommunication between application processing agents and customer agents, there is no proper medium to address these concerns”
“Multiple processing agents handles one ticket, this causes misinformation, manual errors and incomplete document uploads”
“Many processing agents and customer agents have issues understanding the text mentioned with respect to the order”
“Photos uploaded by the users in the application are most of the time incorrect. There is no proper tool in the backend to easily correct this”

Data synthesis

To synthesise our findings, I facilitated a workshop with the research team, inviting several processing agents to contribute their perspectives. This collaborative session helped us identify key themes and actionable insights.

Communication
The customer isn’t receiving clear enough instructions for what is required for their application
Sometimes the PAs select too many reasons and the customer gets confused
There seems to be some unclear communication between PAs and CSAs
Sometimes PAs send orders to MIN unnecessarily
- sent to MIN for no good reason
Incorrect Entries
Sometimes customers keep sending their documents wrong, so PAs ask CSAs to help those customers.
Countries have different guidelines for photo uploads
Some governments don’t accept special characters, or names need to be shorter (e.g., United Emirates)we don’t know how to fix that
When United Emirates launched, it was missing a Training docwhen the Training doc was included, the gov’t fee was incorrect
Notes
The tools we have in the backend are not enoughPA feels like it’d be better if all the tools were in the backend using image editing tools take time
Sometimes exact MIN reason doesn’t fit and PA has to choose the closest one and write notese.g., no option for black & white passport, we select blurry and leave a Note
Tools
Multiple 3rd party tools are used for editing photos
Around 90% of the orders need editing of some sort eg. they send a passport in JPG and not in PDF, so we have to convert it
There seems to be some unclear communication between PAs and CSAs
Order management
Customers are not assigned the same PA who handled their MIN before for the same order
Customers are frustrated by receiving emails asking them for more information.

Insights

By this stage, I had clustered and themed the research findings. The next step was to convert these findings into actionable points to give it to the order processing teams. To achieve this, I convened another brief ideation workshop with the research team. During the workshop, participants were asked to vote on the most critical solutions from the list, focusing on those that could help reduce the incidence of incomplete order statuses. After the voting, I swiftly translated these prioritised solutions into clear, actionable insights that the agents could easily understand and implement.

communication image

Communication

As there is very little communication between Customer service agents and Processing agents, a Slack channel would be beneficial.

training image

Training

The processing agents should be properly trained to avoid silly mistakes such as photo editing and note writing.

color coding image

Color Coding

Make sure that specific colours are used to differentiate comments from Processing agents and Customer Service agents to avoid any confusion.

color coding image

Consistency

It is always best to reassign orders that go to a 'More information needed' state to the same Processing agents, as they are already familiar with the issues.

Takeaways

Power of Design Research: The willingness of processing and customer agents and other stakeholders to share their pain points and suggestions became the foundation of our project.

Narrative:  We created the Focus groups and qualitative interviews with the agents to cater to multiple scenarios to empathise better with the agents

Confidence: This project helped to assess and validate the skills I bring to the table as an individual contributor